Wanting to try her hand at literature, she had taken it into her head to fashion willy-nilly novels, letters, comedies, and other nonsense like that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, IX In 1955, two hundred years after Madame Louise d'Epinay began planning an autobiographical novel, it was finally published in its original form. Seeing an earlier version,…
All those years he was married, frequenting the map stores. The eight quadrangles surrounding the house in which he lived and worked, he saw them in relief: he pinned them over his desk like messages, justified. He spent long hours studying them. He fell in love with maps. At night he would lie on the…
– from Hamann's Bond The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has become…
He wanted, above all, to crack The New Yorker. He could not deal in the right things, a lorgnette, an Italian garden, a grandmother, Mexico. Mexico is perfect because it is a proximate paradise. Situations come undone without the vexation that Europe can sometimes bring. The New Yorker watches for mise en scene. You feel…
Only a desperado would leave a guitar in the high weeds near the cooling tower. We fear that children, slavering Kool Aid, will stare into that deep, fringed eye, and go alien, hop-ups, strings pulled too tight along their thin necks. Mothers fear the lost guitar, and shiver as they remember the only way to…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Seamus Heaney Managing Editor Susannah Lee CONTRIBUTORS William Aarnes has poems forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, and Swallow's Tale. He teaches at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Stephen Ajay's second collection of poems, The Whales Are Burning, will be published by New…
RINGS: ON THE LIFE OF COLLIS PHILLIPS recounts the experience of an ex-boxing champion and trainer who has lived most of his seventy-five years in the Saint Bernard housing project in New Orleans. It is based on personal experience, three years of research, letters, legal documents, hospital and prison records, newspaper reports, and scores of…
These are hunters. In their season, they lurch down from the camper through gray-crusted snow to hunch ancestrally: the shiver-and-shake of urination, marking the clearing with steam. They have license. When trees rage and char, when we fold silkskins into the camphor, chewing dark fat, these men take down long bows, the fowling pistols and…
When we invited contributions for this issue we said that our theme was “the inter-relationship or overlap of autobiography, biography, and fiction.” We asked potential contributors to “think of the three genres as forming a triangle. We are looking for prose writing — fiction, essay, memoir, journal, etc. — that falls within this area.” We’ve…
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